Hackaday Links: August 15, 2012

An Octopart for RC equipment

When [Zach] started building a quadcopter he found it very difficult to source the required parts. Thus was born CompareRC, an aggregation of several online RC retailers. There’s over 150,000 parts in the database, all searchable and sortable by lowest price.

Segway iPad Skype teleconferencing robot

It’ll be a while until robots completely eliminate the need for any human interaction, but until then there’s Double. It’s a two-wheeled balancing robot with an iPad dock, controllable via a remote iPad.

Free electronic design

In case you weren’t aware, Fedora has an electronic design distro that includes just about everything needed to build electronic circuits called Fedora Electronic Lab. FEL has PCB designers, circuit simulators, editors for just about everything, and support for PICs, AVRs, and 8051 micros. Thanks for sending this in, [Simon].

A surprising amount of graphics tutorials

Khan Academy, every autodidacts best friend, is now teaching computer science. Right now, there is a heavy focus on drawing graphics, and everything is coded in the browser (using Javascript…), but at least it’s a start. The fundamentals of programming are platform and language agnostic, so this looks to be a great way to learn programming.

Categories is a little more difficult, but something that I’m definitely working on. I originally had categorical search…but it’s very hard to standardize parts between vendors. I ended up with a lot of parts that were miscategorized and the search results were really, really bad.

Categories and parametric search are basically my top two priorities right now.

Whereas the “Double” looks extremely cool, it’s hard to see what’s so original about it – Balancing on two wheels? Yawn. Remote presence? Zzzz… Patent it? Maybe in the US, probably a bit difficult elsewhere. $2,000 (on pre-order)? Segways were over $4,000, but there have been a lot of seriously cheaper home builds.